Posts tagged fun

There are a lot of good photographers out there, in fact there are a lot of brilliant photographers out there in Web Photo Land and some are also excellent communicators who unselfishly share their hard-won knowledge. They are to be commended for sharing what they know, to help the less experienced along their own photographic journey. In the same spirit of knowledge sharing, I’d like to offer up my list of top tips in an area in which I have consistently excelled over the years – bad photography.

If you want to be the worst photographer that you can be then ignore these at your peril. If you read and digest them, unfailingly follow them and burn them into your memory, then in no time at all you will be taking the worst photographs of your life. Guaranteed.

Never read the manual. Manuals are for amateurs and you want to look professional, don’t you?

Don’t use a tripod. You already have two legs, what do you want to carry another three around with you for?

Don’t go out in bad weather. Why on earth would anyone want to? There is no point getting cold, wet and uncomfortable, and anyway, you spent a lot of money on your camera and you don’t want to risk getting it wet.

Always photograph from eye level. It’s obviously the most comfortable position. Getting down on your knees is awkward and as for lying down, well, you spent a lot of money on your camera and you don’t want to risk getting it dirty.

Don’t pay any attention to the background. It’s your subject that matters, who cares about what’s behind it?

Don’t pay any attention to the foreground. It’s your subject that matters, who cares about what’s in front of it?

Photograph in flat lighting whenever you can. Photographs are meant to be flat.

Don’t chase first light. You are much better off staying in bed resting and dreaming about the great photographs you will be taking later on.

Winter weather hasn’t really arrived yet, at least not for the North York Moors. Vicious gales and horizontal torrential rain has been the order of the day so far. Occasionally, when winds have calmed and the rain has ceased, clear overnight skies have given rise to a frosty morning. But it’s a weak frost that vanishes at the sun’s first touch.

In dips and hollows frozen puddles provide a source of entertainment long after frost has melted away. Exploring them with a camera is always fun, especially when there is a mix of direct light and open shade. I think of it as playtime for grown-ups.

An artist carrying a couple of pots of paint across his studio slips on a carelessly placed paintbrush. He goes one way, the pots of paint go another and paint goes everywhere. Picking himself up he looks down on the mess he has made, first in horror, then in amazement as he begins to realise that the moving paint has created a dynamic all of its own. Grabbing another pot of paint, this time he deliberately throws it down to join the mess. Then he does it again. Once the paint has dried he cuts up his newly decorated floor, decides what to call his new creation, talks a gallery into exhibiting his ‘art’ and sells it for a ridiculous amount of money.

The photographic equivalent is to accidentally press the shutter release while walking along. The resulting mess inevitably end up being thrown away, but sometimes there may be a hint of something worth keeping – but only a hint. Yet moving a camera during exposure is an idea worth exploring and if applied with a little bit of intent, rather than relying on pure luck, an amazing array of likeable images can be produced.

I find that dragging a camera like this works best with an exposure time somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds. Any shorter and there isn’t enough movement, any longer and it becomes difficult to keep control of what is happening, especially if you use a ball head like I do instead of a pan and tilt. Linear subjects also make the best raw material; trees with straight trunks naturally lend themselves to this technique and are by far the most popular subjects.

After that it’s simply a matter of giving it a go, figuring out what you do and don’t like, and then fine tuning your technique until you are satisfied with the results. One good thing about this technique is that you don’t need a top quality lens or camera to achieve a good result, just your own unique vision and the willingness to practice. Is this a creative exercise? Yes. Is it Art? Some love it, some loathe it and so it may be. Is it photography? I’ll let you decide.

If you own a camera, you have probably done it. If you own a camera and a telephoto lens, I’ll be amazed if you haven’t done it. Done what? Photographed the moon of course.

The most memorable art lesson I had at school was when I was taught how to mix the colour grey. Not, as you might think, by mixing black and white but by taking a bit of blue, adding some yellow and then some red. White was added last of all to lighten the tone as required. I now know that this is called a tertiary grey. I was too young at the time to understand such a grown-up word and my teacher called it a colour grey. That was a valuable lesson learnt; grey can hold a colour.

What colour would you say that the moon is? Rising or setting, it can appear to be anything from straw yellow to blood red. By the time it’s hanging high in the sky on a clear night, it looks bright and white with patches of grey. And that’s where our description usually ends, reinforced by the fact that most photographs of the moon shown by astro-photographers have been deliberately de-saturated to black and white for maximum impact. Just like the one shown above.

This is the original (non black and white) photograph. You are probably thinking that it still looks like an ordinary mix of bright and dull patches. Look closer at the duller parts. Look long enough and you may see many subtle variations. That’s because these bland looking patches aren’t as innocent as they look and their secrets can be teased out with a bit of care.

By taking my time, making sure that I get an exposure that shows as much detail as possible and is as neutrally colour balanced as conditions allow, I have a picture that I can work with. By patiently adjusting saturation levels in Photoshop those lunar greys can be persuaded to reveal their hidden colours. Using the photograph that I’m showing you here, I end up with this result.

My picture was taken with a camera and telephoto lens. If I stretched my budget and bought an astronomical telescope, I would probably be able to get a more stunning result. If I took things to extremes and multiplied my budget a couple of hundred million times or more, I could do what NASA has done. Theirs is an extreme example that was taken by the Galileo spacecraft during its kamikaze mission to Jupiter.

NASA describes their psychedelic tour de force as a false-colour mosaic that reveals a treasure trove of scientific information. I think of my modest effort as an exaggerated colour image. After all, I’m only having a bit of fun while trying to bring out what is already there, even if it is cleverly disguising itself as shades of grey.

Nature photographers are like farmers. We both know that the chance of getting absolutely 100% perfect conditions for anything longer than a sliver of time is nigh on zero. And so, without any specific intent, we tend to major on the gap between what we want and what we get. Farmers get pilloried for it and are often labelled as perpetual complainers (‘the ground’s too wet’, ‘the ground’s too dry’; ‘it’s too hot’, ‘it’s too cold’; ‘the good weather came too early’, ‘the good weather came too late’, etc. etc. etc.).

Not so photographers. We glory in the shortfall (of which there has been plenty in 2012) and romanticise the gap. Writing and talking about the blessed moments when we snatch some sort of victory from the jaws of defeat. The end result in itself doesn’t have to be overly dramatic or attention grabbing, merely something satisfactory that we managed to tease out of apparently nothing.

Why do we do it?

It could be for an endorphin fix (or as I like to think of it, nature’s happy pills) as we revel in the flush of success. Then there is the warm glow. Not the warm glow of an open fire on a cold winter’s night, but the deep down inside warm glow of satisfaction; a glow that is often accompanied by a suitably smug grin. This can be so fulfilling that sometimes the struggle to succeed becomes a glorious activity in itself.

Then again, maybe, just maybe, it’s because when we are wallowing in that gap we find out what kind of photographer we really are. And if we, having faced the dark demons of our psyche that lurk there, can crawl back out on the other side with something we really like, it proves without a shadow of a doubt that we are the kind of photographer that we always knew we were – brilliant.

It’s wet. It’s very wet. It’s very, very wet. “Two months’ rain falling in three days” ran newspaper headlines. Even after making allowances for journalistic hyperbole I’m sure you will appreciate that it’s very, very wet indeed. In fact, it’s a disaster. Unfortunately this is not a one-off. Monsoon-like downpours in July are following on the back of “the wettest April – June on record”.

So what do you do when faced with endless bad weather and no end in sight? Take a holiday? Been there, done that, my wife bought the tee shirt and I lost a pair of binoculars. It was raining before we went and it was still raining when we came back, and it’s still raining now.

There is nothing else for it. Rain is part of nature’s portfolio and I’m supposed to be a nature photographer aren’t I? (It must be true; it says I am on my website.) So, bravely wearing the best stiff upper lip I can muster, I’m going to keep calm and carry on. In the spirit of practice makes perfect, I’ll hopefully be taking better photographs of rain-soaked-everything at the end of this so-called-summer than I was at the beginning.

I’m wondering if I should add an umbrella to my camera kit. Not for my camera’s sake, that’s well sealed against the elements, but for my upper lip. I don’t want it to get softened by rain. That would be a real disaster.

This Blog…

This occasional blog is a tasty serving of nature and wildlife photography, with a side dish of my experiences out in the field and lightly seasoned with any random thoughts that occur to me along the way.

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